And The Sun Yet Rises
by Dead-End Rainbow
Summary: Saving the world doesn't prepare you for living in it; living in the world doesn't prepare you to save it. Maybe there's a balance there, but does anyone know how to find it? All grown up in a world eating itself alive, seems like a good thing to ask.


**Disclaimer:** Uh...yeah. Characters not mine. Un-beta'd. Way, way post-series. Questionable content. Questions raised without immediate answers. Don't like it, don't read it.

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**AND THE SUN YET RISES**

prologue:

|SOMEWHERE A PHONE IS RINGING|

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_I dress in white._

_ There are times when there is not enough of it in the world, so I dress in white. I brush my hair back, brush it back until it lays slicked flat and long against my scalp, until my face is sharp and exposed. I hide it beneath hoods of white. These do not look like bone, I tell myself. I am not the dead, I tell myself, I am white. White is forever, even when there is not enough of it in the world. The world will tell you it is white but it lies. I have tried the white of the world before, in white skin and white powders and smoky white in long glasses. I have tasted the white of the world and it is black underneath, so I dress in white. Because something must be. I am white and I will rise again._

_ I do this every time because I know that this is the way that they know me, the only way that they know me. I comes before them when I dress in white. History writes red lines in my skin, but they see only white. I step out and I know this--they see only the truth. They see only white. I raises his hands to them and say, "The white will come again, the white will make us clean and whole. We will all be brothers, the world will sing, and together in white the darkness shall be driven from our veins. It will be as before, only greater. This will not end in shame." What I mean is 'We will be real again. You will see. Everyone will see. This will not be like highschool.'_

_ They smile. All around me they smile and cheer and reach out to touch me. Their hands brush my sleeves, which are white. But I know it is not the white they are seeing. I know those smiles. I hate them. I hate those smiles, the way they reach to touch me, the way they cheer and they cheer but they do not understand. They do not see the white because they are busy looking at me. They do not see, they do not believe in the white because they are busy seeing me, believing in me, believing my words without knowing or caring what it is I say. 'They see only the truth' I think, but I know I am lying to myself. They see only what they want to see. They do not see the white at all. I smile, and take their hands, and I hate it._

_ It is the way they cheered in highschool._

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* * *

  
_

The phone was ringing.

Manjoume Jun was not sleeping, but the sudden jangle of noise and its rattling vibrations across the desktop woke him up anyway. He had been. . .doing something. He frowned, leaning back in the chair until he stared up at the ceiling. It was an unfamiliar ceiling, the way they always were, and he would be leaving it behind again soon. Sometimes he thought he saw things in all these ceilings he passed beneath, like some child's game or those three-dimensional picture books, but he was always in such a hurry he never had time to make them out. He did not answer his celphone as it jittered towards the edge of the desk. What had he been doing? For that matter, when had he set music as his ringtone? He always seemed to remember it being so functional, so practical and down-to-earth. And why not? Here he was, a grown man running around the world chasing some childish gambler's dream with a half-filled bag of odds and ends he called possessions. _Something_ in his life had to be. Still, it was a catchy beat. He was certain he had heard it somewhere. Maybe in highschool, because it sounded like the kind of thing they might have listened to back then.

He sighed, bringing one hand up to rub at his eyes; closing them to run his fingers across the lids and then pinching the bridge of his nose with a sigh. He remembered his brothers had rubbed their eyes like this once. He had never understood why, because it never helped anything. If anything, drawing the calloused and slightly scar-worn pads of his hands across the aching lids only made things worse. But there was something about the delicately backlit tracery of veins over his gaze that relaxed him, and maybe that was the reason. Maybe it was something as simply and comfortingly familiar as the steady pulse of blood in his veins, so functional, so practical, so stable and monotonous and real. There was nothing more down-to-earth than blood.

"Aniki?"

Manjoume's frown deepened into a genuine scowl as he waved a hand at the sniveling, high-pitched voice hovering by his ear. He felt his knuckle brush something cold and solid in passing, slightly clammy and soft-skinned like something gone bloated with winter rot. The feeling was familiar, but he still told himself he hated it. Part of him did. "Go away, zero attack."

"But aniki!" He felt the cold spot shift, drifting around to float above his other shoulder. The angle would be awkard to hit it from without moving. The years had given it time to learn those places. "Aniki, your phone!"

He grunted slightly in response to that, but said nothing as he placed his hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself to his feet, opening his eyes as he did so. His bangs still hung into them in great ragged chunks, split ends tickling his cheeks. He didn't know why cameras seemed to love him so much when half the time he was sure it looked as though he brushed with a rake. Or not 'sure'; he _must_ have looked horrible, but for some reason he could not be sure. It may have had something to do with mirrors and the fact that he did not use them. The mirror in this particular hotel room had been bolted to the wall; when they had not let him take it down, he had requested an extra sheet to cover it with. The white cotton stared blandly back at him from the far wall, but he could not quite remember why he had put it up in the first place. Only that the less he cared how he looked the more others seemed to. It had probably started with the ponytail, which his 'master' swore made him look like a rockstar. One of these days, he would get a haircut. He had been saying it for longer than he could remember. For now, the ragged hair matched his image nicely. What else would he have, with such tattered clothes? The last time he had fallen asleep waiting for his train to arrive, he had been dragged unceremoniously from his bench and nearly arrested as a bum. They were cracking down on those lately.

He placed his hands on the desk, brow furrowed, and paper crinkled beneath them. He looked down to find himself staring at the business section of yesterday's news, the stock listings. Of course. That must have been what he was doing. He smiled faintly, an uncertain tic at the corner of his mouth. It was ironic, in a way, that after all his family fights about trying to make hobbies into careers that he should turn a career into his hobby. Shouji and Chosaku had always thought he would make such a good businessman if he had only applied himself. He wondered what his brothers would think if they knew that little Jun saw the stockmarket as one more rolling gamble. He did about as well in it as he did in anything else--when he suceeded he did so phenomenally. When he failed. . .well. He had taken out loans more than once on failed ventures. He had been told more than once by bankers, friends, sponsors that he was too reckless. If he did not always pay his debts, they would have stopped lending a long time ago. But he would never stay in debt. He would never need another second chance. He closed his hands in the paper, all grey with smudged ink, and watched it crumple under his fingertips for no reason, no reason at all. The phone, rattling steadily towards the edge of the desk, suddenly fell. It struck the floor and was silent.

_What if that was Shouji?_

The thought came suddenly, and Manjoume jerked his head upward as if he could catch a second self speaking the words in that small, beaten voice. It was his, and he knew it well, but he had not heard it in years. The idea was ridiculous, of course. He had not spoken to either of his brothers in a long time. They had come to his graduation, but no words were exchanged. It was not that they were angry anymore--not him and not them--it was simply that somehow in all this time they had never quite gotten around to speaking. Shouji would not have called him, not now after so many years, and he did not have to. There was no second self in the small hotel room beside him because he did not need it like there were no second chances because he did not need those, not any more. There was only a potbellied spirit with sick lemony skin hovering by his shoulder, a shrouded mirror on the wall, his faded bag on the bed. Maybe he had been packing. On the desk by his hands and the crumpled newspaper sat a small collection of photographs, the cheap frames dinged and bent from travel, of faces he had not seen in years. He was alone except for these. That was the way things were. That was reality, blood in his veins.

He had been packing.

"Aniki?"

He closed his hands completely, balling the newspaper between his palms and then tossing it carelessly to the small metal trashcan beside the desk. It rattled briefly against the rim before falling in with a rustle of paper against plastic liner. He was cleaning house. Packing up. He had a tournament scheduled and he had to be on a plane by five, leaving this strange ceiling behind and moving on to the next one. Still chasing that dream, chasing the dream around the world as if he really thought he could catch it any more. When he suceeded he did so phenomenally, of course. He was Manjoume Jun, after all, Manjoume Thunder, and when he talked everyone listened; when he walked, every head turned. But when he failed, wasn't that phenomenal too? Sometimes he wondered which duels got the better ratings. So many people in the world liked to watch someone lose. Someone who would put on a show for them, one way or the other, one ten one-hundred a thousand, that's Manjoume Thunder for you. He knew what they said. Sometimes he starts fires and sometimes he just makes a lot of noise but damn, does he always do it with a bang. That's Manjoume Thunder. It doesn't matter if you lose to him, he's good, there's no shame, and you'll just make it up next time. Everyone does. Never strikes twice, ha-ha. To the professional circuit, it was all he was--the travelling roadshow in the tattered black clothes, a running gag or impressive prop. He was there to knock them down to make them look human, and there to make their glorious comebacks look good. Audiences loved him and he was there to draw the crowds. They were supposed to have understood but in the end, they took him no more seriously than his brothers had.

No one ever did.

". . .Hey, zero attack?"

The small creature squealed slightly at being directly addressed, floating down from its awkward place above his shoulder to hover next to Manjoume's face as he stared blandly at the pictures on his desk. He could see it wriggling and dancing out of the corner of his eye, eyestalks twined about each other. Even now, he could never quite tell if that meant it was nervous or excited. He wondered if that meant he never quite cared. "Aniki? What is it aniki, can I help? I can help!"

Manjoume said nothing. _Why do I bother_, he wanted to ask. _What am I doing here_. He could have still gone to college, he supposed, and so what if he would be a little older than the ones who stepped into it right out of highschool. He could still do what his brothers wanted and have a real life, a real career, something stable and practical and solid to hold on to. But they weren't the kind of problems Ojama Yellow would understand. There was very little that Yellow seemed able to wrap his distended head around. Yellow had zero attack problems, and when you were incorporeal those mattered so much more than issues of stable reality. _Why do I bother, what am I doing here, is this what I pushed everyone away for. _ He stared at the pictures. There was only one of his brothers, and it was old. He had seen Chosaku on the news the other day, and his immaculate hair had gone grey at the temples. In the picture it was still black. In the picture, Jun was neat and presentable and had no scars. He had not yet gone to highschool. In the picture Shouji was smiling. San biki. He snatched the frame up abruptly and tossed it towards the bag on the bed without looking. He heard it hit the floor instead. ". . .Go away. You're noisy."

"But aniki--"

"Look." He snapped a hand up, grabbing the hovering thing from the air. It was cold and soft in his hand, gruesomely soft beneath the skin like rotten fruit wrapped around tiny, birdlike bones. Yellow whined. "Look, if you can't help me pack I don't want you here harassing me. Now get out!" He squeezed, squeezed until he thought it had to break. Instead it popped out of existence with a wail, leaving a grimy, slick feeling on Jun's hand. He rubbed it off on his pant leg and worked his fingers absently. The scars always hurt when he touched the spirits like that, the long ones across his palms most of all. He did not quite remember when he had gotten those, but their aching was just another part of his day by now. Maybe because it was reality, blood in the damaged tissue. There was nothing more down-to-earth than blood. Certainly not the photos on his desk, the pictures he carried with him everywhere of people he had not seen in years. There was only the one picture of his brothers. Everything else was highschool. Everything before that had been someone else, everything after that was just chasing dreams. Somehow, he had begun and ended in the span of three years between his first black jacket and graduation. Manjoume Thunder, who never strikes twice. Manjoume Thunder, who was supposed to packing, and getting his show on the road.

He picked the frames up carefully, one by one, and stacked them on the desk. Somehow they ended up in order, and he found himself staring at graduation on top of the pile, where his master and surrogate brother Fubuki had set the camera to take them all together one last time. He still didn't know what Fubuki had been doing there, somehow managing not to look out of place with people so many years younger, as if he were still just one of the kids with his beaming white grin and loudly colorful tropical shirt. He had thrown a pink kimono over Manjoume's graduate robes just as the camera clicked. He looked ridiculous, wrapped in bubblegum pink, with one hand thrust emphatically in the air and Judai hanging off his shoulder laughing in the scrunch-faced way that looked so horrible on cameras and always sounded so infuriating, blaring in his ear. But he had been smiling. One ten one-hundred a thousand, and they had all gotten on the boats and gone home. Manjoume had entered the professional league by the end of the summer, where his slapdash decks and screaming bouts were popular but not taken seriously. He did not know about the others, except that Misawa had gotten married sometime after. The invitation had turned up in his PO box in Tokyo, coated with stamps of forwarding addresses, three weeks after the event. Manjoume had written a short note of congratulations and apologized for not being present. He sent them a gift, but did not remember what it had been any more than he remembered the girl's name. He did not know about the others. He knew he had stopped expecting to see Judai across the field from him a long time ago. Placing a hand over the graduation photo, he closed the past out and balanced the pile against himself as he lifted it up and carried it to the bag on the bed. All of that was yesterday, and today he was cleaning house.

He wondered why he had stopped in the first place, but he could not quite remember. That probably should have bothered him; how little he seemed to remember sometimes, as if he left little pieces of his past behind beneath all these passing ceilings. It probably should have given him images of some stranger breezing through and picking him out of the textures on the ceiling and laughing at him, laughing at who he used to be. It probably should have gnawed at some deep part of him, carefully kept muzzled. Instead, he unceremoniously shoved the pile of battered frames into his bag and forgot about forgetting. Something made a cracking sound. He ignored it and bent to pick up the single picture of his brothers, and shoved that in as well. It was as simple as that and he was packed. His clothes and toothbrush and spare cards, his life essentials, were already in the bag. Everything else belonged to the hotel. In highschool 'things' had been a lot more important to him, but life had taught him to travel light because nothing was as irreplacable as you thought it was. He had gotten rid of a lot of things since then and didn't even remember what he had done with them. It seemed like so long ago.

He was wrong though. He was not done because his phone was on the floor, and there was one more frame on the desk. He always packed it last. He returned to the desk and picked it up, not looking at it but wrapping the frame carefully in an old t-shirt instead. There were no bends or dings there, no places where the cheap plastic protector had cracked or chipped its black edges. Cradling the cotton-clad mass against his chest with one hand, he bent to the floor to retrieve his phone. The screen was flashing because he had missed a call, but there was no number listed. He blinked at it mildly before pressing a button, and the flashes ceased. His phone must be broken. It explained both the lack of number and the strange ringtone. He should probably stop tossing it around or letting it fall off of desks; it was an old phone. He was sure it had been around, with its bland and purely functional ringtone, for longer than some of his photographs. Certainly longer than the one he held against him now. He shook his head, returning to the bed to place the last frame carefully into the spot he had left it at the top of his bag before closing the entire disaster and hefting the strap up easily over one shoulder. Someone had joked once about how little he packed for someone with so much baggage. He did not remember who.

Tilting his head back, he let out a long sigh and stared at the ceiling as he slipped his battered phone back into the pocket of his battered jacket. He could see nothing but the faintly uneven texture painted into the white. Next time he would answer it. He had been saying it for longer than he could remember. Next time he would answer it. Just in case. He would cut his hair, he would go to college, he would write his family, he would answer his phone. He would stop and pick himself out of the ceiling, remember to remember what he had forgotten about forgetting. He would have something solid, something real. He would leave nothing behind. He would strike twice. One ten one-hundred a thousand, Manjoume Jun, Manjoume Thunder, with phoenix fire would rise again. Next time. One of these days. Just in case.

For now, he had a plane to catch. He reached out and pulled the sheet from the mirror as he passed, but did not look back.

* * *

The phone was ringing.

It sat in a nondescript charger in a nondescript apartment of one, on a nondescript dresser across from a nondescript bed. The room was frentically clean in the way that single men with no time but much inclination sometimes keep things when they realize that they never _have_ company, and they never _have _nice young ladies to bring home and show around but supposing that they do they do not want to be thought of as sloppy. The room smelled faintly of dirty shirts and bleach and, sickly sweet, an artificially citrus afterthought of air freshener. In one corner, tucked there almost guiltily, a table was draped with a pale blue sheet which had begun to fall off at one corner. A model train peered cautiously out from under it, tucked safely away in its model train station. The power switch rest on an extended cable beneath, set down carefully on a tidy magazine rack populated by tidy model and motor magazines. They were dogeared, well read, but clean.

The phone went on ringing, but no nondescript figure rolled over under the bland white sheets, bleached and re-bleached, and rose to answer it. He had fallen asleep rather in the living room like a study of the japanese salaryman with his frumpy and oddly grandmotherly glasses slightly askew on his nose, tie pulled loose but never quite removed, sprawled ungainly on the couch with a faint methodical snoring passing his lips as the late-night-early-morning shows rambled on the television. A takeout box sat on the coffee table in a drift of napkins. The box had begun at some time during the night to leak, and they were turning the peculiar shade of too-dark-to-be-yellow which takeout oil left behind. The man on the couch, nondescript and hurriedly, guiltily tidy as his apartment, would have been chargrined to see it.

He did not. He slept on, through the morning show laughter of just after four in the morning, and through the ringing of the phone. His mind had long since programmed itself not to awaken until the sound of his alarm clock jarred him from the next room with its angry emergency blat. He would be in too much of a rush to be chargrined then. So the phone went on ringing, and then stopped. The screen did not light to register a missed call, but became suddenly dark and silent, furtive and out of place as the fleeting scent of canned oranges hanging in the room.

The phone was turned off.

* * *

The phone was ringing.

The phone had been ringing for about a minute now, rattling out some banging rockish beat that actually wasn't even half bad and possibly about a quarter good; maybe as much as two-thirds good on the bits where it really got going. It reminded him of some of his old CDs, sitting in the battered leather music visor of his battered dirt-colored car, and was the kind of thing Kenzan might have had set as his ringtone if he had not been _quite_ so bent on leaving it as the theme from Jurassic Park. He seemed to be the only person he knew who smiled whenever it played. His co-workers--at least, the people he worked around in places the thing actually had some kind of reception--hated it. As he sifted through the collection of papers and upended books and displaced tools on his desk with one hand in search of his phone, he determined to check the song in his ringtone settings. It must have gotten switched when he dumped the toolbox on the desk. Must have hit a button. But it wasn't a half bad song at all, and he found himself nodding along with the lively beat. Maybe he would keep it for a while, just to throw everyone off a bit. A folder of newspaper and magazine clippings toppled from the edge of the desk, and he kicked it aside carelessly to send scraps of newsprint fluttering about his feet. There was dust on everything, mixed with the grit from his unwashed tools. Maybe he should think about using his office more often. It would certainly make finding his phone easier.

Of course, it was a small desk. He had never really needed anything bigger than something to hold his computer and one of those fancy little printer-scanner-fax machines. He had never even really wanted the latter; it sat atop a filing cabinet next to the desk itself and generally took up more space than it was worth like most modern conveniences. But the point was, it shouldn't be so hard to find his damned _phone_. With a regretful sigh he set down the sandwich that had been occupying his left hand and dove into the pile of junk two-fisted. He considered just upending the desk and dumping everything on the floor. Which he wouldn't do, because some of those tools were precision instruments and fairly delicate. But it would have given his detractors something else to howl about.

"Not at all professional!" He mumbled with a faint chuckle. Briefly, he paused to pick up a scrap of editorial paper. He snorted after a cursory glance, and let it flutter to the metal trashcan by the desk. It was already overflowing with similar such notations. "Barges around like a wild animal! Just a common thug! Oh, the humanity! Hey, I was looking for this pen." He paused to place the item in question on his keyboard, and continued searching. He'd never heard his phone ring for quite so long before.

He flipped up a back issue of some monthly scientific journal--'Jurassic Joke?' was emblazoned massively across the cover, with a more sedate subtitle almost lost under its glaring skepticism. 'Crichton Theory' and the search for saurian DNA. Someone had thought it would be clever to use a shot from the old Spielberg movie on the cover, har-de-har-har, and the fact that they were probably laughing all the way to the printing press with _that_ issue probably couldn't have been much more obvious if they'd added a shot of the magazine staff rolling in the aisles. Kenzan paused in his search as he regarded it, brows drawn faintly. He remembered when they had been getting ready to write it. The man who had come to interview him had practically been holding back giggles the whole time like an unruly highschool kid. He knew the look like the back of his hand, because there had always been someone in highschool that you had to hold back from laughing every time they opened their mouth. He had known a few, been close friends with a few, but it had just never been Kenzan. It wasn't that he minded, of course. He had _liked_ Jurassic Park. Who didn't like Jurassic Park? And where did they think he'd come up with something like 'Crichton', anyway? But it made his supporters antsy when he laughed the jokes off and played the big dumb bonedigger game for media, the way it made them antsy when he told them it wasn't media's opinion that mattered. It drove them absolutely birdshit bonkers. His face relaxed into a grin, and he tossed the offending publication over one shoulder. There was a reason he liked field work better, anyway.

The phone, of course, had been under the magazine. But by the time he looked back down and realized this it had stopped ringing. He blinked at it, waiting for the screen to flash and inform him he had a new message, but it did not. He shrugged and picked his sandwich up again, pulling the rolling chair out and flopping into it so that it squeaked alarmingly and threw up a cloud of brownish indoor dust. He was not worried about the phone. If it was important they would call back, and the catchy little tune had apparently already been accidentally punched in as his new ringtone, so he could check what exactly it was later if he was still so inclined. Life always took care of itself if you let it.

Leaning back, he looked up at the clock on his wall. Just after four in the morning, and here he was just coming in from the airport, still too high on his last dig to let jetlag or silly little things like exhaustion and the throbbing ache in one leg bring him down. He figured he had about an hour before nature caught up to him and he popped a few advil to help him crash. It was fairly routine by now, though he could not remember when pain had joined the party, and the only part that bothered him were the pills. Even the two coated over-the-counter candydrops of ibuprofen he had begun to take before bed were more than he had ever wanted to be stuck with. He was supposed to be on something stronger according to his doctor, but he didn't like being dependant on the watered-down and prepackaged stepsiblings of someone's street high to get to sleep. More than dislike, he _hated_ it. Aside from that, he had tried his prescription for a while, and how was he supposed to get any work done down here on earth if he was busy cruising the stratosphere? But for every objection he raised his doctor had had just another warily stern look. It was the one the man had started wearing, he was sure, when he had been bodily lifted from the floor by the collar of his neat white coat for suggesting fragment removal surgery to fix the problem in his patient's leg. Whenever that had started. No charges had been pressed, but Kenzan got the feeling his doctor didn't like him much. Rather than stir up more trouble, he had taken the prescription slip and picked up his pills. He always got the bottle refilled on time.

He figured one of these days he'd have to find something to do with his stash. He'd be screwed on the occaision of a neighborhood drug search.

"On the bright side," he told the last bite of his sandwich, "if palentology ever loses its charm I can moonlight as a dealer until something better comes along." He popped it into his mouth, wiping his hands on the legs of his pants. They came back up smudged with orange dust, and he lifted them to turn them in the light, watching it glint with chips of powdered quartz and mica. Somewhere in there, he wondered if there might not be fragments of bone as well, broken up and ground down like any other rock into nothing but loose dirt. Nothing but dust. He raised his hands further, placing one finger in his mouth, closing his eyes to taste it--gritty, dry and oily at once it tasted of meat and earth and the sharp, glassy fragments of mica and quartz which had gleamed so whitely from the orange clay. It did not taste like bone. It tasted like his own skin. Maybe that was the secret, after all, but damned if he knew what it meant. Tastes and secrets were never as straightforward as rocks and bones. They were cryptic and unexplained like the slow dull pain in his leg. They meant something. _Something._

A familiar song was playing. He smiled a little, because he always smiled when he heard it. Jurassic Park.

The phone.

He opened his eyes to dull slits--reptillian slits, he had been told in highschool, and in his second year hours observing the drowsing habits of the Academy's resident crocodile had proved the description delightfully accurate--to regard the phone before blinking at it once, long and slow. The ringtone had been changed. He knew it had been changed because he had _heard _it, but here it was playing his good old theme song; the one that made his colleagues wince, the one that made the critics cackle. The one that always made him smile. He reached out, confused, leaning forward to take it from the desk and hit the small green talk button as it came alongside his head. "Hello?"

The puzzled look left his face instantly in favor of a grin, and he leaned back again. The chair squealed in protest, but the sound was lost in his sudden outburst of accented english. "Verne! Hey. Yeah, I just got back in. You have any idea what time it is out here?" He paused, laughing. "Japan, Vernie. _Nihon desu. _Yeah, I still hang my hat here. What's the news?"

He listened, nodding pleasantly and making faint sounds to the affirmative or negative in all the right places, the chair squeaking its dismay with each small movement. Unconciously, he tapped the beat of a song he did not know against his leg with one finger. He was getting to the part which he had--unconciously--pinned as the chorus when suddenly his hand fell to a stop, and the chair uttered its last unhappy yowl as he shot to his feet and upended it to clatter noisily to the floor. For a moment, Kenzan panicked when he could not feel his leg beneath himself; it seemed to have been replaced by a floating, tangled wad of barbed wire from somewhere around the knee down. He slammed a hand down on the desk to steady himself, sending more dust up and making his tools rattle. A small spade thumped off the edge onto the floor and he ignored it, wheezing slightly and trying to blink the sparks from his eyes, the pain as sharp and white as chipped quartz. Worse than any dream floating in the sucking pressurized void of space, worse than any rockslide he had ever found himself pinned beneath, the pain crushed him against the desk. His arm began to shake where it held him up in stead of his knotted, barbed-wire leg. For one moment, some clear voice in the back of his brain told him to sit before he fell. It sounded hilariously like Richard Attenborough as John Hammond telling Jeff Goldblum--who had actually been a pretty okay Malcom--with the curt annoyance of a harried teacher that everything was under control. He couldn't help remembering that by the end of the story, he'd been screaming it.

Yeah, good old Richie had a hell of a hysterical scream. Kenzan tried very hard not to emulate it.

Somehow though, that thought made it okay. He realized that the pain in his leg was winding down to a dull and constant thump again; he could feel the ache between the curls of wire again. He could see his office, disused and dusty and cluttered, begin to come into focus between the white shards in his eyes. He could hear Verne's voice coming up, tinny through the cellular phone's speaker and punctuated by cracks of the straining plastic where he still clutched it with white-knuckled desperation in one hand, and asking if he was still there, okay, still on the line. No deep-space pressure, no sharp rocks, no genetically enginereed dinosaurs chewing off his legs--which had not of course been replaced by barbed wire or anything else--just jetlag, nature catching up to him, and Vernie on the phone, Vernie who hated Jurassic Park and pretty much everything Crichton had ever written, Vernie with his funny somewhere-in-America accent who never really laughed at anything but most especially not being called 'Vernie'. He sucked in a deep breath, tasting dust and panic and something acid in the back of his throat. He suspected he had almost thrown up. But he had not, and he had not fallen either. Everything was under control, you bet. All fences are _on_.

The breath came out again in a short, ungraceful chuff. "Yeah. Yeah. I'm here. I heard--yeah. Yeah, I'll be there. No shit I'll be there." He put his weight on his leg as he spoke, tentatively, but though the slow pain grumbled in its little wire-knots it did not deepen and it did not speed. He stood with a faint grimace and moved for the door. His mind was already drifting away from cryptic unexplained things like the tinny sound of cel-Verne and hurt legs. He was ticking off airlines in his head. He would want a fast flight. Fast. In and out, best if he could charter someone but he didn't know anybody for that so commercial would do just fine, as long as it was fast. He strode through the office door and small livingroom, also dusty, plucking his jacket off the back of the sofa as he went. Pulling the bag off the floor. He hadn't had time to unpack. Somewhat belatedly, he realized he hadn't even taken off his shoes. "This is. . .is. . .It _is_, Verne, whatever the hell it is it sure as shit _is_. I'll be there."

Kansai. He realized it even as he made his last verbal nods to Verne and hung up the phone only to begin dialing again. It was a bitch, but it was the closest bitch with international flights and he'd have to use the airport at Kansai. The traffic alone was going to kill him. His leg snarled again, almost audible this time and sounding oddly Malcom-like, that sniffily condescending, dry-laughing high-as-a-kite-and-still-all-here sneer that was really the only reason Jeff Goldblum had been a decent Malcolm at all. _I'll kill you first. Give me half a chance and I'll get you before Kansai ever does, because this is no controlled system. The butterfly is flapping its wings. The fractals spread. Life--_

"Will find a way." He said it cheerily, in the same breath that became "Excuse me, Kansai airport? Yes, I'd like to purchase a ticket. Ah, for an immediate flight, as soon as possible. . ." He hiked his bag up over his free shoulder as he spoke. He would pick up some advil on the way to the airport, he decided. The biggest bottle he could find.

The door closed behind him, and the apartment went black. Like fossils waiting to be found, only his footprints in the dust suggested anyone had ever lived there at all.

* * *

The phone was ringing.

It vibrated urgently in the pocket of a jacket left to hang, rattling the collection of phone charms attached to it like brightly colored tolling weights. It went unheard or ignored in the black depths of the fabric. It rang for just over three minutes, and was silent. Draped across the light of its screen, blinking blindly with a missed call, the silver masks of comedy and tragedy seemed surreally alive; eyes flickering endlessly and unseeing in the dark.

* * *

The phone was ringing.

Bleary eyes opened to a sleep-haze of darkened room, blinking at the nightstand through bangs rendered sterile grey by thin chinks of streetlamp-light filtering in through the blinds. It was late, early-morning late, not quite four thirty, but the phone must have been ringing for some time because when Asuka reached out for it the heavy-beated song it had awoken her with halted the moment her fingers touched the plastic casing. She yawned and sat up as she closed her hand around it, free hand rising to rub at her eyes and then catch against her hair in a stretch. There was no reason for anyone to be calling her cel at four in the morning, but she flipped the phone open anyway to check the number. It took her a moment to realize there was not one. She blinked at it slightly, working her fingers loose from her bed-mussed tangle of blonde to rub at one eye again. Her eyes were not at fault--the phone had not registered a call. She snapped the phone closed and set it back on the nightstand, drawing her knees up under the knotted bedsheets and wrapping her arms around them. She could have been hearing things or--more likely--simply not hearing her own phone. She did not recognize the ringtone, some rock-sounding thing in a rythm that had not been popular for a long time. It had probably been someone's radio outside.

Still, she was awake now, and she should probably get out of bed; if only to close the window but almost definitely to shower. Her skin felt unpleasantly slick beneath the goosebumps rising on her arms and the exposed edges of her breasts, and she was sitting in a cooling damp spot of night sweat. It made her wonder what she had been dreaming about, and she decided she did not want to know anyway. Some things, she supposed, were forgotten for a reason. She did not immediately move, but instead sat in the darkness waiting for her eyes to adjust, wishing the sweat swallowed up in the bedclothes was not so cold, wishing the window could close itself, wishing she had not woken up to the sound of a young man whose name she could not immediately remember snoring lightly beside her. He shifted, rolling towards her, and she moved from the bed at last; turning out of the sheets to sit on the edge with her feet on the cool carpet. She had no desire to be touched when her skin felt so silkily unclean, the goosebumps rising in waves across her abdomen as she exposed it to the window with its fluttering blinds. She could hear the man beside her curling into the warm spot she had left behind around that cold puddle of sweat.

Suddenly, she just wanted to be alone.

Rising abruptly, Asuka strode purposefully to the window. She passed a stained motorcycle jacket and shredded jeans; a little dress--not just a little dress but a Little Dress, because all women _must _have a Little Dress--neatly folded on the back of a chair above their crumpled floor-bound disarray. She ignored them all in favor of reaching under the blinds to pull the window closed, careful not to slam it and wake the man in the bed but firmly enough that it settled with a heavy thump into the slightly warped frame. It did not make her feel any warmer or more alone. She leaned against the wall beside it, the paint frigid and sticking slightly to her damp skin, and closed her eyes. Maybe if she did so she could pretend--sometimes, when she did so she could roll back time and find herself in the warm garden of years gone by, the oak leaves whispering and long grass tickling awkward girlish knees where she knelt in puddles of pleated skirt and shade. It would smell of summer and sunny breezes and heather on the hills, of grass seeds and the peculiar scent that clear days have, so clean and crisp and free of storm's sour bite. She could be alone there, in places where the rough men with their scarred necks and jackets smelling of cigarettes and ozone could not go.

_You do this every time._

She opened her eyes again, lightly, the room a dim blur between her lashes as she was jarred from the sunlit garden by the sound of her own voice. She did this every time, and every time that cold imperious tone intruded on her peace to tell her so; to tell her none of them were good enough for her, they were beneath her, beneath her standards, beneath everything. It told her that if she did not want them to touch her, she had been a place they could not go once and could be again. Should be again. She was better than this. It was a tone she was used to, one she had listened to for most of her life which said I will have this, this is mine, this is who I am and what I deserve. She supposed it was her pride. She might have been in agreement, but she knew what it was really looking for and she had no interest in it. She and her pride were one and the same, perhaps, but they were not looking for the same knight in the same shining armor. What did she need some white knight for, after all? Tenjoin Asuka was no one's idea of a damsel in distress even on her worst of days, and had sent no small number of would-be heroes, villains, and hapless bystanders scrambling for cover when they treated her like one. She lit up her own stage and kept dancing, defended her own pride on her own. Maybe, she supposed, she just missed the sentiment. They said it was the thought that counted, after all, and her brother's constant stream of doting worried phonecalls was sweet but not what she was looking for. He would do anything for her--_had_ done anything for her, everything for her, more than she had ever wanted for her. He had helped her raise sign off on her own house when she had only dreamed of one, given her a shoulder to not-quite cry on when she wanted it, provided for her every need before she even knew she needed it but it was not what she was looking for.

What _was_ she looking for? What did those desperate violent men have for her that was so much better than the clean boys with their soft hands and flowers who came to her, still stuttering and fumbling as they had in highschool? The nice boys treated her better, they did not leer to her face. They were stable people with stable lives and they wanted to hold her, love her, support her, be surrounded by her. They always had. As long as she could remember, as far back as her days of girlish knees and pleated skirts where others were accused of bearing the deadly cootie she could remember their nervous smiles. Her brother acted as a kind of protective filter, forcing back the ones who would not have been good enough, and there were still so many; there were still always more. So what could she possibly be looking for? Successful, beautiful, sought-after and loved, what more could she possibly hope to find down in the seedy substreet caverns with their haze of smoke and electric air?

She was doing it again. She did this every time. She didn't even know what it was she was doing; only that she did it every time.

Her problem, she supposed, was that somehow she had let herself be trapped in this street-cycle like some strange cultish idea of Saturday night rituals. She closed up for the weekend and came home from work. She ate her supper. Talked to her brother on the phone and loved every moment of it but knew, somehow, that it was not what she was looking for even without knowing there was anything else to seek. She took her shower with the radio turned on too loud, to stations she did not like, and toyed with hair and makeup and a Little Dress that she hated because she had _always _hated Little Dresses and the women who relied on them. She made herself clean and presentable and then slipped between the woodwork of the city into dirty smoke-smelling places, burned flesh and metal places beneath the streetline where men wore scars in matching sets and everyone else wore matching paper masks. And she looked for something, without knowing what it was. She always found something else, not knowing what it was. She always ended up this way, dreams unremembered, naked shoulder pressed against a cold wall, looking out between the blinds to streets she had never been on but knew, somehow, because they were all the same. And then she did this. She did this every time. Whatever it was.

_It's dirty._

Except that it could not have been. The only part of her that felt dirty was her skin, its goosebumps rising in waves beneath a sheen of evening sweat. A car drove by outside, the rising light of its headlamps sending bars through the blinds to fall across her abdomen in distorted lines. She reached up and touched her own stomach lightly, as if she could feel it slip away. In moments her skin was dark again. She felt nothing.

_You're dirty._

She was no such thing. Everyone had their little indiscretions; this she was certain was a part of being human, and everyone knew that humanity was something one must maintain. She indulged hers once a week, on Saturday, so that she would have Sunday to herself to wash the film from her surface before life took over again. Only once a week, and for the other six days severed all ties to that part of herself. Far cleaner, far better people than she had given in to worse with greater frequency. She could even name a few, if she had too, though she would rather not. She did not feel like arguing the virtue of strangers with herself tonight. Even the ones she knew. The part of her that knew what she was looking for would not have liked that, but her pride tried to push the names through anyway. One of them, it was certain, would have taken her hand and pulled her out of this gritty downward slide.

Downward slide. She wasn't sliding anywhere. Once a week was nothing.

Suddenly, she just wanted be alone.

Shrugging herself off from the wall, Asuka felt her shoulder prickle slightly where the skin pulled from the sticking surface of the paint. It was an unpleasant feeling. A dirty feeling. With a shudder she reached up, rubbing at her shoulders until she scratched at them, feeling the sweat roll up under her tidy and carefully trimmed nails until it was not just sweat, until it was dead skin, until it was not just dead skin but scratches welling with something warmer and wetter and more solid, more real than sweat or skin could ever be. Suddenly she felt dirty, dirty dirty and she wanted to be clean. She took three quick steps away from the wall, towards the darkness of the bathroom door hanging halfway ajar. She would creep into his tiny cramped shower and scrub herself raw. She had seen his bathroom, and did not like it with its rust-stained sink and cloudy mirror, his small shower cubicle with the tight boxy walls and dingy curtain. The very thought of using it sent her skin into convulsions of shuddering distaste. But she could scrub her skin red beneath the clean white lather of cheap soap in there, and she liked _that_ just fine. She could start to wash the film away from her surface, because that was all it was--she was not dirty. The surface was dirty. Her skin was dirty and it was Sunday, after all. Sunday was for cleaning. Sunday was for becoming pure and innocent all over again. Sunday. Sunday was _her _day.

But the bathroom was his, and she stopped after the first three steps, clutching her shoulders beside the wretched Little Dress so neatly folded on the chair. She did this every time. She never used their small showers, and as if the ritual would not be denied she could not bring herself to pass him, snoring slightly against the pillow she had used, and face the cloudy mirror beyond. We draw the circles just so. We raise our hands. We speak as one. And the sacrifices are made, again and again and again. And this is how it is done. This is how it is always done. This is how it is meant to be. She shivered again, clutching her shoulders tightly, and lowered her head as something warm prickled in the corners of her eyes. In the dimness of the bedroom, the dress on the chair became a damp blur. Those thoughts, ugly mantric thoughts, were not something she always did and did not belong in her days. They were something she had left behind. Something she had left behind in highschool, like the music she played too loud on Saturday nights, the music she no longer liked. She blamed the ringtone--which had not been her ringtone, it had been his ringtone, or the sound of a radio in the street--because it had sounded like something the boys would have listened to then; a rythm that had not been popular for a long time. It had woken her up and started all of this.

But she was no one's idea of a damsel in distress on her worst of days.

The shuddering fit passed more quickly than it come, and Asuka felt her fingers loosen in her shoulders even as she blinked her vision clear with the curt impatience of a person used to being in control. Because she was. She had been in control back in the girlish age of pleated skirts, in highschool, in college, in the early days of teaching when she had been little older than the children themselves. She was in control, and nothing was going to change that. Certainly not some aggravating outdated jingle. Certainly not a little surface grime. She slid her hands down, took a deep breath, and reached for her clothes so neatly folded on the chair; a little beacon of a clean and reasonable world in all this streetside mess. It felt dirty, to step back into her clothing with her skin so slick. But it was only surface film which she would wash when she was home, in a bathroom which could actually make her clean. She would not begin her Sunday in someone else's world, and when she turned to pull her jacket off the hook by the door and on again over the material of her clinging little dress--her Little Dress, she despised the feel of Little Dresses slithering against her thighs--she pulled loose the scrap of paper hastily crammed into her pocket. It fluttered to the floor aimlessly in the dark as she stepped into her shoes, a phone number she had not glanced at staring blindly upward at the ceiling. She would not have used it anyway. She hated it when they tried to clutter up her week with their complications; their desperate violent lives. It wasn't what she was looking for, but they always tried. They did it every time.

There was a mirror in his entryway.

She paused in front of it, blinking slightly and brushing her hair back from her face; running her fingers through it to smooth its bed-tangles down. She had not noticed it coming in; none of the others had had one there. It was not cloudy in the way of his bathroom mirror but clean in a manner which suggested he must have checked his hair or shave before walking out the door. Maybe, he might have used it to check if his high shirt collars would hide the scars. Asuka found herself reaching out to touch it, the face made grey with the early morning dark. Her appearance seemed somehow muffled as she drew her fingers across the cool smooth surface leaving heat-trails in their wake. Somehow haunted, as if the dreams she could not remember had taken something imperative away and sweated it out into the stranger's cold sheets. There were places on her neck turning dark where he had carelessly kissed her, his mouth rough on her skin. She looked, she thought, strangely small and wide-eyed, strangely little girlish as if she should have taken another step and felt the pleats of her gradeschool skirt swishing about awkward knees. Her fingers closed on the glass, slowly slipping closed against the cool image. She had never looked at herself, after. Her face seemed foreign and it made her think of her old dreams, different dreams, foolish little girl dreams. When sometimes, some part of her had still wanted a knight in shining armor to come for her and that had been okay. She pulled her hand back from the glass, still closed.

Some knight in shining armor would to make things all right and he would say--

Her arm snapped forward, closed hand tensing from a loose coil to a tight fist as it slammed into the mirror with a harsh rattling _thud_ against the wall. She felt her lips move, numb, but knew what she was saying though she could not hear her own voice. _I don't know what I'm looking for._ Her hand pulled back, knuckles aching.

_Thud. _Again. The dull rattle against the wall, her voice louder in a husky whisper. "I don't know what I'm looking for."

_Thud. _"I don't know what I'm looking for."

_Thud. _"I don't--"

_Thud. _"know what--"

_ Thud._ "I'm looking for."

In the back of the small apartment, the darkness of the bedroom, she could hear him stirring. He would wake up and come out, mussed and half-asleep, and call her 'baby' or 'beautiful' or maybe, when he saw her standing there slamming her fist methodically into his entry mirror, 'you crazy bitch' because he did not know her name any more than she knew his. Because he wasn't what she was looking for. Maybe, when she found it, it would already know her name. It would take her hand and pull her up out of the spotlight into the shadows and kiss her ear telling her it knew what she wanted, it knew what she was missing, it knew there was something more out there the pretty boys who loved her so could never give. For a moment, her hand loosened as she regarded the familiar young stranger in the mirror. It was what she wanted, that reflected stranger; someone to make it better. Someone to give her the world. She could see it in the wide little girl eyes; those wide garden eyes.

When her hand came forward again it connected not with a dull thud but with a harsh crackle; a tight glossy shattering sound as the mirror suddenly shuddered and collapsed around her fist in jagged lines like thin ice. She hissed at it slightly, through her teeth, a sound she did not make on Sundays or weekdays or even Saturdays, leaning into the impact and letting her weight twist the glass beneath her skin, making it grind and pinch as pieces fell to the ground. _"_That's not what _I_ want." She turned sharply on her short businesslike heels, wrenching the small mirror from its nail on the wall as she went. It struck the ground with a riotous noise, the noise of the stranger awakening in the back room, but she did not look back as she strode out the door and let it snap closed behind her with her blood on the knob in abrupt smears. This was Sunday. This was her day.

She did this every time.

* * *

The phone was ringing.

_Click._

"Hi! You've reached the voice mailbox of Misawa Daichi. I'm away on my anniversary and I'm not taking any calls right now. If this is a social call, shame on you. I told you all where I was going. If you're a student from my lecture tour, try calling professor Sanada instead. If you're one of my students and you're on your second call trying to figure out what professor Sanada is talking about, I wish you the best of luck with that. If this is about a grant or publication, or the Gates project, please leave your name and number and I'll get back to you as soon as reasonably possible. I should be coming home around the fifth. Best wishes."

_Click._

The phone was ringing.

* * *

"So, Yaboshi's up in the box, right?" In the cool air of Domino's early morning, the young man with his enthusiastic gestures left faint plumes of mist when he breathed. His companion nodded absently in response to the question with eyes half-lidded in drowsiness. He need not have been awake enough to do so; the storyteller clearly did not care and continued on as if the question had been rhetorical. "Right, Yaboshi's in the box, you know, like he is Saturdays. So I figured it'd be pretty safe, music-wise, but then he starts playing this. . .this _thing_. Like, I don't know what it was. The bunny hop or the funky chicken or the groovy gopher handjive or something. One of _those_ kinds of things. And I'm sitting down at my table going 'oh man. Ohhhhh maaaaaan, I am soooo going to have to deal with that', and--Hold on." He held up a finger, cocking his head to one side. Dark bangs frosted with auburn hung into his face, lurid and limned with electric blue-white in the outside fluorescents. "You hear that? That song."

"More dancing animals?" The other man yawned, putting a hand over his mouth to stifle it. "Look, Yuuki, this is really fascinating. But I just got off and I'm dogged. Can I go home now?"

"Yeah, yeah." He began searching, twisting his head even as he tapped his foot a bit. "Nice beat. Don't you wanna know about the--"

"He was drunk. I know. Yabo came in drunk off his ass. We all know. You're not the only person who works here."

"But I'm the one who had to haul him out!"

"Yeah." His companion shrugged, pulling a battered pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and lighting one up with the contents of a dogeared matchbook. He spoke around it, gripping it with his teeth. He began walking away before the end even caught, pushing the pack and matches back into his coat as he brushed past. "We all saw that too. Big man, Yuuki Judai, saved the day from the shitty drunken DJ. I get it. Good night."

"Aw, come on Matsu-san." He stopped searching for the source of the song and put his hands on his hips, squinting critically down the alleyway after the retreating figure. "That's not my job though. Totally not what I'm paid for. Don't I get a bonus, or a cookie or something?"

He was given a dismissive wave. _"Good night_, Yuuki."

"Night." He grumbled it slightly, shoulders slumping and lip pooching out slightly in a sullen and not at all grown-up pout until his tired shift manager had vanished around the corner. He then gave him the finger. "And it's _morning_, you stingy asshole. O-dark-fucking-thirty. No wonder I never get paid my overtime."

With a sigh he dropped his hand, shaking his arm curtly so that a cigarette and dogeared book of matches dropped from the tucked sleeve into his palm. He did not smoke, but he put the filtered end to his mouth and lit up anyway. Because Matsu's cigarettes tasted like shit--like stolen shit and dirty pockets--and he didn't smoke but it was always worth it to watch that bastard fish around for his One Last Smoke and find nothing but an empty packet. And then Judai would give him the big brown schoolboy eyes and say 'aw gee boss, I donno, I sure didn't take it, and oh hey, look, something shiny' and Matsu would start cussing and just walk away. Because he _knew, _sure. But that was what he was paid for. Judai inhaled deeply and let it out again, eyes lidding faintly as he squinted through the smoke at the concrete wall across from him with its faded posters, its scratches and graffiti and dying 'employee entrance only' sign in three different languages. He took another long drag before reaching over and putting the ember out in the middle of one 'o', leaving a darkly smudged circle. "_That's_ what I'm paid for." He pointed accusatorily at the sign, the smouldering period in its dinged and paint-splattered circle all hazy in the smoke of his dropped cigarette. "That's what you pay me for, and don't you forget it."

The sign did not answer, of course, being neither Matsu nor his superiors and only a sign after all. Judai sighed, knowing he would not say the same thing to Matsu's face the next time he saw the man, and stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat. It was a warm but a little tatty, once a buffed autumnal red he had liked very much and now a bland brown he did not particularly care for, and did not match the work clothes he still wore underneath. He knew that they made him look respectable, a lot more respectable than he was used to; more respectable probably than a lot of the people who used this particular establishment he found himself employed by and certainly more respectable than a lot of the people who came into the back to play at his table--double or nothing, ante up, joker's wild, you bet. The clothes were uncomfortable and made him feel stupid but Matsu liked his boys to look respectable, and the big guys Matsu answered to liked their boys to look respectable, and the general rule seemed to be that if you looked respectable and acted respectable and sounded respectable and smelled respectably enough like you made an effort to at least bathe every so often, everyone would smile and nod like Matsu did, Matsu with his stolen cigarettes, and pretend that you were respectable after all. It was a lot like highschool, in a way, but all the classes were after curfew. Judai missed highschool most of the time. The payout hadn't been very good, but at least he'd gotten a little respect.

"Man." He did not elaborate on this general statement of discontent. Instead, he began to walk down the alley alone, scuffing his feet through the thin puddles to send up scuds of dirty water and wet trash. He would have to wash his shoes later, but he didn't particularly care. He was thinking about school now, and that was never a good way to end his evenings. He always ended up wondering where everyone was, how they were doing, why they didn't keep in touch any more since they'd all been such good friends and knowing just as well why. He had caught the tail end of a duel once on tv in which the loser had stalked below stage with the stiff, proudly defiant sullenness he could have sworn was the sole property of Manjoume--and the guy had been scruffy enough, sure, but it had been on the small screen in the back room at work and the sound was muted so he hadn't caught any names or faces--and last week he had gotten a postcard from Misawa. He and Kenzan still shot the breeze sometimes, hanging around on the phone until one of them had to hustle, but that was really about it. He had fallen out with Johan long ago, in fistfights and harsh words and chipped teeth. Jim had stayed close until he died visiting America for Asuka's college graduation. It had been a stupid death for a guy like Jim; just a minor fender-bender barely hard enough to set off his rental's airbag. The bag had hit his face with enough force to send the chunk of rock and metal in his right eye socket back into his brain and that had been that. Judai had still been too busy playing hero back then to hear about it until well after the funeral. Asuka had left a lot of hoarse messages on his phone calling him a heartless sonofabitch, and that was the last he had heard from her as well. He had lost Shou's number the last time he had changed phones. He didn't know what Shou's excuse was. Maybe he was busy these days, too. "_Man._ Growing up really sucks."

He knew better by now, but Judai half expected to hear an emphatic squeaking sound agree with him from somewhere behind his left shoulder, or a soft murmur in the deep corners of his mind. He did not, of course.

He hadn't heard Winged Kuriboh, or Yubel, in years.

Pausing at the mouth of the service alley, Judai tilted his head back and looked up at the broken streetlight above. Tiny nests of sparks flickered here and there inside of it where the bulb had shattered but still tried to light. He took a moment to wonder what exactly had happened to him and where exactly he had gone wrong, to slip from being everyone's hero and everyone's Number One to just another slick set of hands flipping games of Rabbit and Blackjack back behind the false wall. He should have been on the professional circuit, wowing the world with his duels--every one of them the best ever--or he should have been somewhere else, somewhere with someone who needed a hero who always came through. He should have been somewhere that the line between here and that other, not always entirely pleasant place was thin enough for him to hear his partner chirping happily after him, see it fluttering by his shoulder when he turned his head. He should have been somewhere Yubel's shadowy arms sometimes wrapped around his shoulders for no reason at all and her cold, breathless breath rustled motionless through his hair. It had never been that pleasant then, but now he found he missed it. He wished that he had stolen another cigarette--though not that he had kept the one he had doused--because the smoke would have given him something to focus on. Something other than the little sparks of white thunder snapping and twitching over his head and the dark sky of four am tinged red with city light, like lightstorms and magma gleaming up from the ground. He could not see the stars.

". . .It's not that it depresses me, you know?" He spoke to the broken light, or to his absent partner, or to the empty place his guardian had left behind, but not to himself. Judai had never been much for talking to himself. "It's not like I'm going to go cry in the corner. It just seems kind of stupid. You save the world enough times, you're not supposed to wash up."

No one answered. Somewhere down the road, car engines rumbled and wheels thumped dutifully along the pavement. Someone played American oldies on a crackling radio loud enough that they were barely recognizable as english. It was not the same radio he had heard the music coming from when he spoke to Matsu; it was the wrong kind of music, the wrong kind of sound--more like a ringtone than a song, though he did not have a cel of his own at the moment and it had not been Matsu's--and the rocky beat from before had been both clear and close by. He was pretty sure he had heard the song at least once before, but he couldn't remember where. He tried and only came up with the Academy again. He pulled an ugly face and lowered his head again, moving out of the alley and heading towards the bus stop two blocks down. Matsu had a car, but he never offered to give anyone a ride and no one ever asked. Matsu, after all, knew what some of them were paid for. Apparently he was very much afraid of losing his air freshener.

There was a phone booth on the corner. Judai passed it every night--morning, really, o-dark-fucking-thirty--and he was absently aware of the graffiti scrawled on it. In the tradition of all things Domino in nature or origin some if was the expected Call Aya For a Good Time or Ichihiro Was Here and some of it sent chills down his spine, familiar chills, the things like meaningless glyphs and a gaping eye not spraypainted or penned on but wildly scratched into the transparent panels. Its pupil was not a pupil but another eye and they would have watched anyone who used the booth, though Judai had never seen anyone do so. He always ducked his head when he walked past it. He was not afraid of it--not quite, he had been through too much for that--but he did not like it. It had a tendency to accrue dead birds in dirty black and grey drifts against its side and smelled perpetually as though something were waiting to go to rot around it. He doubted that anyone went by it with their head up at all.

Today he hesitated before stepping off of the curb, watching the walk signal across the street, and then abruptly swung aside and pulled the booth's battered door open without quite knowing why. A drippily painted happy face split into grotesque egg-yolk halves as he did so, and then came together again behind him as he closed the door. The air smelled like phone booths always smell in the city, in neighborhoods where everyone is respectable but you know it's not what they get paid for; like piss and pennies and wet paper in the cold. He leaned his head against the scratchy eye in the wall and ignored it as familiar. He listened and heard nothing but the cars down the road and the scratchy radio. The only squeaking was that of the door hinges in the breeze. The only voice was distant, drifting up from down the street. A dirty feather was pinned against the ground where booth met concrete, half in and half out. It crackled faintly when he nudged it with his foot.

His fingers, usually quick and fluid, fumbled absently in the change slot of the phone. He chuckled when they felt coins slide under them. He was a lucky guy, seemed like. Always pulling the right card, always picking up change, always getting the seat on the bus that wasn't next to a puking wino. Never getting caught. He had never, _never_ gotten caught. Maybe that was the luckiest of all. It wasn't just anyone who came on luck like that. His hand tucked the change into his pocket and the other rose up, pulling the phone off the receiver and holding it against his ear. The dialtone was loud and aggravating, the plastic cold. He kept his head against the eye on the wall and wondered how it would feel to press the coins into the slot and dial the numbers he halfway remembered and lay everything out like cards on the table. All the cards, maybe. Ante up. Joker's wild. No safety. You bet.

"Anything for a price," he said into the receiver instead, and lowered it to rest mouth down across his shoulder.

Lucky bastard. He was one lucky bastard. He knew exactly why he wasn't on the professional circuit, the way he had always said he wanted to be. He knew exactly why he had not remained in touch with his friends, and exactly why he could no longer hear his partner fluttering constantly beside him over his shoulder, exactly why no ghostly arms wrapped around him, exactly why he was washed up however many times he had saved the world, no longer a deep darkness but a muzzy, faded grey. Judai was a lot of things, but he was most certainly not stupid. He had never really been stupid at all. He was just a lucky bastard, the world's luckiest bastard of all maybe, and he was not ready yet to pay the price.

"Shut up." He said it into the silent booth, but he did not say it to himself. "This is paying plenty."

Wasn't it? For something that worked overtime, above and beyond the call of duty, deep into o-dark-fucking-thirty, was it still enough?

He withdrew from the wall suddenly, the phone jerking off his shoulder and hitting the thin metal shelf in the booth. His hand swung up out of his pocket and the change he had taken from the slot scattered from his fingers, striking the eye on the wall with tiny dull sounds, plastic and metallic and muted in the pissy air. His lips had pulled back in an expression Matsu would not have known, that almost no one would have known, an ugly sneer that did not belong on everyone's hero or everyone's Number One. "Whaddaya want, a _tip_?" The coins rolled about his feet in the dirty swatches of paper and feathers as he kicked the door behind him. It ratcheted and cracked unpleasantly before shuddering open as he turned on his heel and stepped out again into the crisp downtown air, hair whipping momentarily around his face and into narrowed eyes. Behind him, the phone began to squall its protest at being left off the hook as he turned onto the crosswalk for his bus stop. He threw it the finger as he went. "Keep the change."

Behind him, a man watched from just around the corner by the phone booth. The man was dirty in the way of the men that sometimes threw up on Judai's buses--though never in the seat next to him, no sir--and Judai ignored him the way he tended to ignore people on his way home from work. After a moment, when Judai did not turn back to the booth again, the dirty man crept forward around the corner and up to the open door. He licked his lips and ignored the eye on the wall, looking instead at the coins on the floor. He was thirsty. He was so very thirsty, and every little bit helped. Scratching at his dirty hair, he moved into the booth and bent to scrape up the thrown change. Above him, off the hook on the metal shelf, the phone began to ring. It did not jangle but blurted out a banging rockish beat, and the man rose slowly to blink at it with bleary bloodshot eyes. He hesitated for a moment, his fist full of loose change, and wondered if he needed a drink enough that he was imagining things again. After a moment, he reached out and slowly lifted the phone from the shelf to his ear. "Huh. . .hullo?"

For a moment, silence.

When the screaming began, Judai did not look back to the phone booth. His bus had arrived, and he did not turn his head to see as he boarded it and showed his bus pass to the driver. He was smiling when he took his seat--one without a wino sleeping next to it, of course--and humming a familiar song. A pleasant rock beat, best around the chorus maybe, which had not been popular for a long time. He looked up into the dirty tracklights of the bus as people stirred around him to peer out the windows.

If he stared into the lights hard enough, he thought he could see wings.

* * *

_I dress in white._

_ The music plays from a small white radio against one wall as my white hands move in turns across the table, the white sheet, in the white light of white candles clean-burning on their white wicks. The smoke curls in white veils from the flames, vague against the white walls, and it is not enough. It will never be enough because here it is clean but the world is not white. Not yet. I believe that this will change because I will change it. I believe that this will change because that is as it should be. I believe that this will change because I will go mad if it does not._

_ Only the cards are not white. Their backs are dark and marked with dim stars. They are laid out in even patterns, in a form predescribed by those before me. My white hands move in turns over them and I does not hesitate because I am afraid but because they demand it of me; adolation and veneration of their purity in shades deeper than white. I do not hesitate but revere, worship, hover in quiet awe. This is the way that things should be. This is the way that things are done. This time, it will not end in shame. It will not be like highschool. In white, the world shall rise again. My hand lowers and presses the edge of the thick paper. My pulse is slow and my breathing shallow. When the card is turned, it flashes in the light and I see that The World shall rise again._

_ The Fool stares up at the starlight with his feet lined against the precipice, the world black around him, as if he sees salvation. As if he sees the white._

_ I smile, and my teeth are white as well._

_

* * *

  
_

_ Somewhere, the phone is ringing._

_

* * *

  
_

"The sky went off white,

it snowed for fourteen years.

The sunlight splintered into all our darkest fears."

--Geoff Rickley, 'Into the Blinding Light'


End file.
